Form always matters when a philosopher has something important to say

zoals de laatste zin luidt van Piet Steenbakkers Spinoza's Ethica from Manuscript to Print: Studies on Text, Form and Related Topics [Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 1994 -206 pagina's, p. 180].
Daaruit komt ook het volgende citaat

Whoever is not already a convinced Spinozist
can simply ignore all the 'cogently' deductive proofs.

Deze trof ik aan in een werk van iemand aan wie ik binnenkort een blog ga wijden en die deze tekst, die hij een belangrijke rol liet vervullen in zijn betoog, had aangetroffen in Aaron V. Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza's Method, [Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 161] die erop wijst dat Steenbakkers zich daarbij mede baseerde op een tekst van Karl Jaspers, volgens wie aan de grondbegrippen van de Ethica de intuïtie ten grondslag ligt.

Ook Guttorm Fløistad over wie ik begin van de maand een blog had en die in 1967 promoveerde op "The problem of understanding in Spinoza's Ethics," benadrukt in diverse artikelen dat aan de definities (en axioma's) Spinoza's derde kennisvorm ten grondslag lag. Eigenlijk kun je de betekenis en waarheid ervan alleen meevoelen als je het vijfde deel achter de rug hebt en mogelijk een vergelijkbare intuïtie als Spinoza hebt over hoe alles in elkaar zit.
Een verstandige aanbeveling doet ook Beth Lord, die in Spinoza’s Ethics waarschuwt voor een al te kritische houding tijdens het initiële lezen: e.e.a. zal gaandeweg duidelijker worden.

Dit alles wordt voor mij aanleiding de fraaie slotparagraaf uit Steenbakkers boek (zijn dissertatie) die zich bij books.google laat lezen hier – zonder de voetnoten – over te nemen.

5.10 Conclusion, or: Quid erat demonstrandum?

[Chapter 5: Ordo Geometricus: shell or kernel?]

Ever since the publication of the Opera posthuma the geometrical order as a philo-sophical genre is tied up with Spinoza's name, though he did not invent it. When Ludwig Wittgenstein's earliest treatise was to be published in an English translation, there was some discussion about the most appropriate title. Wittgenstein rejected an English title proposed by C.K. Ogden and Bertrand Russell. He preferred the Latin title Tractatus logico-philosophicus, suggested by G.E. Moore, partly because of its Spinozistic ring. Why precisely the allusion to Spinoza was felt CO be important is not clear. The most obvious explanation, it seems to me, is that the association presented itself on account of the decimal layout of Wittgenstein's text. (If that was the intention, we must allow for some licence, for Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus was not written geometrically.)

In the eighteenth century, Christian Wolff brings the (serious) accusation of Spinozism down on his own head, owing at least in part to his systematic use of a mathematical style. It was notably Wolff's systematics that gave rise to Immanuel Kant's devastating criticism of the mathematical method in philosophy as being preeminently dogmatic. Heine's verdict on the use of the ordo geometricus by Spinoza is manifestly influenced by this criticism: 'Die mathematische Form jedoch konnte, seit Kant, in der Philosophie nicht mehr aufkommen. Dieser Form hat er in der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" ganz unbarmherzig den Stab gebrochen.' In this concluding section I will not try to defend Spinoza against criticism of this kind. What I want to convey is the intimate connection between his philosophy on the one hand and the form he expressed it in on the other. Rather than remaining caught on the horns of the dilemma whether the ordo geometricus is the shell or the kernel of Spinozism, I would characterize it as the most appropriate literary form for the philosophical system Spinoza develops in the 'Ethica’. As the application in the Principia philosophiae shows, it is not limited to the system of the Ethica; still I would maintain that it is at its most organic there. Certainly Spinoza could have written a nongeometrical version of the Ethica, but that would have been a fundamentally different work altogether. As a conclusion, I will try to identify the elements that would have come out differently in such a nongeometrical version. In other words: what exactly was it that the Euclidean model served to prove? In order to answer this question, three aspects deserve closer attention: (i) the cogency of the reasoning, (ii) Spinoza's critique of finalism, and (iii) the foundation of his philosophy.

(i) The reputedly greater cogency of the ordo geometricus is an aspect that has attracted much attention in the reception of Spinoza's philosophy. Yet I suspect that it was not of overriding importance to Spinoza himself. In Meyer's preface to the Renati des Cartes Principia philosophiae we find the notion that the geometrical style as such is superior to any other in its argumentative force, and this was in fact a commonplace. The 'locus classicus' for this idea is to be found in Galen: discussing his own works, he relates how he would have fallen victim to Pyrrhonist doubt in his youth, if he had not held on to mathematics. Spinoza may have been susceptible to the general idea, but he certainly did not mean his different works to have unequal demonstrative force. The argumentation of the Tractatus theologicopoliticus and the Tractatus politicus is not meant to be less cogent than that of the Ethica. I even think that the superiority of the latter over its predecessor, the Korte verhandding, resides not primarily in the different layout, but in the further elaborated positions. Cogency does not reside in the form, but in the concatenation and coherence of the argument as a whole. The mathematical model always has a part to play in this, but as a kind of mathesis universalis in the Cartesian sense: a science that embodies all those elements to which the separate branches of mathematics owe their cogency - irrespective of their different shapes.

We may indeed ask how convincing the Ethica has been in history. It was clear from the outset that the work, for all its Euclidean strictness, would never stand a chance of becoming the Elements of philosophical education. The main reason, it seems to me, is that the proofs of the propositions are convincing only for those who already subscribed to Spinoza's starting points. The propositions will be valid only for those who can grasp and unconditionally espouse the definitions with which the Ethica begins and which contain the seeds of the ensuing system. In this context, it is relevant to return once more to Jaspers's observations on the ordo geometricus:

Daher ist a dem Sinn dieser Philosophie angemessen, daβ er als Entfaltung des Grundwissens auftritt dutch Herausholen alles dessen, was in den Grundbegriffen als der ursprünglichen Ausdruck der Intuition liegt. Es handelt sich nicht mehr um Entdecken, sondem urn Klärung, nicht urn Fortschreiten, sondem urn wiederholende Vertiefung.

Whoever is not already a convinced Spinozist can simply ignore all the 'cogently' deductive proofs. The layout, then, is not essential for the cogency of the argumen-tation: a nongeometrical Ethica need not have been inferior in this respect.

(ii) Rather more important is Spinoza's critique of finalism. Crucial for his philosophy is the definitive rupture with the Aristotelian notion of final causes and the concomitant central position of man in the universe. As Spinoza persuasively argues in the appendix to Ethica 1, the only option that can serve as an alternative to finalism is the mathematical approach. As Karl Lowith appositely formulated it: 'Die mathematische Darstellungsform der Ethik zeigt uns eine andere, hohere Wahrheitsnorm als die gewohnlich geltende, indem sie die allzumenschliche Frage nach dem Zweck unter-laβt.

(iii) In the Meditationes, Descartes starts from methodical doubt in order to arrive at indubitable principles: the existence of the thinking subject, the existence of God, and finally God's properties, which serve as the guarantee that the world can be known. Such a guarantee, however, remains very problematic. Spinoza circumvents the problem: instead of beginning by answering the question whether the world can be known, he sets out immediately with causality and shows its development in subsequent deductive chains of reasoning. If he had chosen a non-Euclidean form —which would have been a possibility - then it is precisely at this point, I think, that his philosophy would have been flawed: it would have lacked an explicit theoretical guarantee that the world is causally determined and knowable. The Euclidean form shows this in its practical application: the form does not provide the proof, but it is, so to speak, the proof itself. This then is, in my opinion, the main function of the ordo geometricus: the foundation of Spinoza's philosophical system.

A final remark. The importance of Spinoza's application of the geometrical order resides not only in its philosophical implications. As I have argued, literary aspects, too, have a role to play. In the case of the Ethica it is also through the sheer power of Spinoza's thinking that his Euclidean monument far surpasses everything achieved in this area before and after him. Form always matters when a philosopher has something important to say.

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Om te herinneren noem ik hier ook: 
Piet Steenbakkers, A Seventeenth-Century Reader of Spinoza's Opera Posthuma. In: Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis / Dutch Review of Church History, Volume 77 [1997], Issue 1, pages 62 – 77